


Tangled

by Shinybug



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-24
Packaged: 2017-12-12 20:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/815954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinybug/pseuds/Shinybug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean took a breath and pressed his knuckles to his eyes, watching the starbursts behind his lids. "I don't think I'm qualified to have this conversation," he whispered, mostly to himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tangled

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Season 4, so spoilers in general for that. Because Dean and Cas both have such pretty, pouty mouths, and I had to put the matching things together. I learned that in kindergarten.

When Dean felt the heat of a body behind his, just this side of inappropriately close, he didn't bother turning around on his bar stool. He let out a long, slow sigh and tipped back the whiskey shot he'd been rolling around in his fingers. "No," he said shortly, voice a bit rough as the alcohol burned its way down.

He waited for a response, which never came, but he could feel the gaze pressing on the back of his skull, steady and implacable. "Go bother someone else, Cas. I'm taking the damn night off."

"As am I," the angel replied in his soft voice, moving around to take a seat on the stool to Dean's right.

Dean snorted. "Time off for good behavior? I didn't think you guys got down time." He glanced over to see Castiel staring at the scarred bar top, an uncharacteristically self-conscious expression on his face. Dean was surprised to see that it looked somewhat like guilt.

"We don't," was all Castiel answered, eyes flickering over Dean's face briefly and then away again.

Dean frowned, mulling that over for a minute. This was new territory, but as long as the Apocalypse was going to wait for another day... He signaled the bartender for two more shots, and as the glasses were placed in front of him he turned to the angel. "Do you drink?"

Castiel shook his head, and Dean slid him the shot glass anyway. Castiel stared at it soberly, as though measuring it with some kind of internal Sin-o-Meter.

"You do tonight, if you're going to sit there," Dean ordered him, reaching over to clink their glasses together. "To second chances," he toasted bitterly.

After a moment Castiel picked up the glass and slowly brought it to his lips, then after a brief hesitation tipped it back and swallowed. To his credit he only gasped a little bit, his eyes widening comically.

For some reason it caused something in Dean's chest to loosen, and he smirked in encouragement. "Two jack and cokes, easy on the coke," he said to the bartender, who complied. Dean took his glass in hand and stood up, not bothering to wait for the winged menace before weaving his way through the smoke and patrons to a table in the back, dimly lit and quieter. Castiel joined him after a minute, as Dean knew he would.

He got a better look at Castiel's face this way, and saw how deeply shadowed eyes his eyes had become, and there was a slight hunch to his shoulders that hadn’t been there before. He looked less like an angel and more like a haunted man, carrying ghosts around in his back pocket. Dean knew what that felt like.

"What's going on with you?" Dean asked, genuinely curious now despite himself. "You look like you're having a mid-life crisis or something."

When Castiel looked up at him, eyes blazing pain, Dean realized his joke had hit far too close to the mark. "Jesus," Dean whispered, and Castiel flinched at the casual blasphemy. "That's not very comforting."

"We're not infallible, Dean," Castiel said intently. "You already knew that."

"Yeah," Dean replied, taking a too-large swallow of his drink and regretting it as it hurt the back of his throat like choking back tears. "I just...you're the only one I trust even a little bit. If you don't know what you're doing, how the hell am I supposed to?"

Castiel just kept looking at him with his dark eyes, searching for answers maybe, which Dean couldn't begin to provide since he couldn't even guess at the questions. "I'm beginning to understand Anna. Why she fell. How easy it would be," Castiel finally admitted, slowly, like the words were a heavy weight he had to pull out of himself.

Dean took a breath and pressed his knuckles to his eyes, watching the starbursts behind his lids. "I don't think I'm qualified to have this conversation," he whispered, mostly to himself.

"I don't have anyone else to talk to," the angel replied, the naked honesty nearly too much for Dean to take.

"Man, you really _don't_ know how to take a night off, do you?" Dean asked, his hand clenching on his glass, slipping a little in the condensation, aware of the irony that the angel on his shoulder needed support from him.

"Sorry," Castiel offered, still watching him with those eyes, making it hard for Dean to look away.

Dean swirled the liquid around in his glass, watching the ice melt. "Is this about what you said before, about getting too close to humans? Feeling too much?"

Castiel nodded once and drained half his glass, having apparently decided to embrace the sin of intemperance. His eyes, while still intensely dark, had a certain warm sheen to them that could only be due to alcohol. "We're not supposed to get this close. We're not supposed to want to. We guide from afar, so as not to become entangled."

"But now you're...tangled?"

Castiel blinked slowly and his full lips twitched, lifting curiously at one corner until Dean realized he was smiling.

"I didn't know you could do that," Dean whispered, trying to blame the sudden heavy beat of his heart on alcohol, though he was nowhere near drunk.

"What?"

"Smile."

And the expression fell, replaced by wide-eyed panic. "Neither did I."

"Hey, relax, Cas. I don't think smiling is a sin," Dean said, his hand reaching out and touching Castiel's before he realized he was going to do it. Castiel looked down at Dean's hand on his and then back up at Dean's face. Dean thought he should move his hand away, and he would. Any minute now.

"Why are you here?" Dean asked, suddenly urgent and a little panicked himself.

"Because I'm tangled," the angel replied simply, and Dean suddenly got it, got the whole crux of the problem from creation to the expulsion from the garden, and thought _oh fuck me_.

Dean took a deep breath, then another, oxygen bursting sharply in his brain because he'd forgotten to exhale in between. His hand twitched convulsively around Castiel's, gripping and pulling and meeting no resistance. "Come on," he ground out, voice like gravel in his own ears.

Cas followed him out of the bar, docile as a lamb to the slaughter (and wasn't that an image), around the side of the building to the alley where the Impala sat glinting under a flickering streetlight. Dean pressed him up against the side of the car, bracing one hand on her cold roof, slick with recent rain, and one hand on Castiel's hip beneath the tan overcoat.

He waited for Castiel to say something, to stop him, become enraged or horrified, but all Dean saw was a curious sadness and longing, so he leaned in and tasted the full lips, slightly chapped and permanently pursed in that earnest expression. He took Castiel's mouth in darting kisses that took more than they gave, even though the angel didn't move beneath him, still as stone but radiating heat.

"Will I go to hell again for this?" Dean asked, working his fingers past the waistband of Castiel's jeans, pressing the small of his back.

"I don't know," he replied, mouth finally moving against Dean's and Dean slipped his tongue past Castiel's lips. He tasted like whiskey, warm and bittersweet, and Dean had empirical proof now that angels, fallen or not, didn't taste any different than humans, and there was something important there that he recognized but couldn't quantify.

"Will you?" he asked, rubbing his hips against Castiel's and feeling the beginning of a response.

"I don't know," Castiel whispered, and Dean could hear the echo of wings beating in his ears, and then finally Castiel's hands came up and gripped his head, angling Dean for an inexperienced but unreasonably perfect kiss, urgent and starving for something angels didn't get to have.

Dean's hand shook as he palmed Castiel's erection through his jeans, and Castiel grunted and threw his head back away from their kiss, eyes staring up at the stars and glittering with unnatural light.

"Don't," Dean warned, pressing down hard and rocking against him. "You can regret it later." He leaned in and licked a stripe up Castiel's throat, salt and sweat against his tongue, coaxing a needy sound from the angel. He made short work of the zipper and had his hand around Castiel's dick before either of them could think better of it, stroking the length and then curling two fingers behind his balls and rolling gently upwards. Castiel's hips stuttered forward into Dean's in a jerky, convulsive motion, and Castiel said something in another language, possibly the oldest language, against Dean's ear.

Dean's blood thrummed and sang in his head at the sounds, knowing his ears were never meant to hear them. He growled and set his teeth on the tendons of Castiel's neck, swaying as the angel's hands began to map his body from the waist up, pressing Dean's nipples beneath his shirt, tracing ribs and scar tissue. There was sorrow in the angel's eyes when he leaned back against the car, fingers following the stitched up seams of Dean's flesh. Dean made a questioning noise, hand stilling in the open vee of Castiel's fly.

"I could heal them," Castiel said uncertainly, and Dean had the sense that he was offering something of great value that few ever received.

He swallowed hard and shook his head. "They're mine."

Castiel tilted his head to the side, considering. His fingers kept shifting, soothing on old wounds and at the same time burning new paths downward, resting where Dean's jeans slung low on his hipbones. The seared hand print on his shoulder flared to a nearly intolerable itch deep beneath his skin.

Dean closed his eyes briefly. "What are we doing here, Cas? Are you trying to fall? Because I don't know how that's going to help either of us."

Castiel did that thing with his mouth again, the almost smile, a momentary glint of teeth in the dark. "I'm just trying to feel. I want to understand, to know. What else is worth saving."

Dean curled his fingers again and the angel shuddered. "You know there's more to being human than this--not that I know too much about it, but I've heard stories," he said wryly, keenly aware of the emptiness inherent in his lifestyle, in this age-old dance. "You'd be better off getting human lessons from someone else."

Castiel shook his head, expression open and heated. "You don't give yourself enough credit, Dean. I think I can learn all I need to know from you. I chose you, over anyone else."

And there it was again, that look of hope and hero-worship and exasperation, that undeserved focus and affection that Dean used to get from Sam, and that burned him in a way that left him breathless from the pain of it, so he leaned in and ground his mouth down on Castiel's, trying to replace that look with passion, which was so much easier to handle. He worked Castiel's dick as expertly as he knew how, pulling low cries from the angel's throat and stoking the fires up high enough that he couldn't feel the pain anymore, so high in fact that he missed completely the movement of Castiel's hands until he felt them on his own erection, clumsy and desperate.

Dean had a ridiculous, irrational thought, as the breath caught in his chest and his heart shuddered in its rhythm, that he'd be spoiled now for any humans, male or female, now that he'd felt the love of two angels. He gasped out a laugh that sounded more like a cry, clutching Castiel to him, tight like a tether, guiding both their cocks together and wrapping both their hands around in a perfectly enclosed grip.

Castiel leaned in and sealed his mouth to Dean's as they began to move, and despite the fact that they were standing against his car in an alley behind a bar in a town whose name Dean couldn't even remember, and despite the fact that this was no different from a dozen other encounters he'd had just like this one, it somehow--was. It felt like the end of the world, sacrilegious and dirty and beautiful, perfect destruction, wiping a slate.

When Castiel came it was silent, as though he was afraid to put a voice to the new knowledge and experience, and he held tight enough to Dean’s hips to leave bruises. Dean couldn’t help the small grunt that escaped when he followed Castiel over the edge, and the sound echoed in his head, so embarrassingly human.

"So." Dean cleared his throat, feeling awkward as he cleaned them both off with a rag from the trunk. "It doesn't look like you fell very far," he joked, certain even as he said it that it really wasn't something you joked about with angels.

Castiel measured him with sleepy, slow-blinking eyes. "No, it doesn't seem like it. I'm...relieved, I think."

"You think?" Dean asked, straightening his own shirt and adjusting his jeans.

"I have suspected for a long time that any act of love can't really be a sin, even though down here on Earth there are so many rules. I think I may have been right. Thank you for this."

Something about the way he used the word love made Dean freeze in mid-motion. "Hang on, I never said...that's not what this was about. I'm no good at that stuff. I told you you were better off with someone else, if that's what you wanted."

"Dean," Castiel said slowly, as to a child, "I can feel you, I can see. In here," he touched his fingers to Dean's chest. "Your actions, even these here between us, can't be separated from your will. Everything you do is motivated by love, absolutely everything. Whether you know how to say it or not, or even how to recognize it, makes no difference. That's what love is."

Dean rolled his head on his shoulders, letting the kinks out. "You put a hell of a lot of faith in me. Isn't there a rule about that, something about 'false idols'?" It came out angrier than he'd intended, sudden fear sharpening his voice.

"I don't worship you, Dean. I know you. Better now than before. Well enough to hope."

Dean thought of Sam again unwillingly, of when they were so much younger, of how much he'd lost when he realized Sam had stopped believing in him like that. His brother was slipping away from him, but he was slowly gaining something else. He didn't think it was a fully fair trade, but he was too tired to try to measure things that were too big to fit on the scales.

At the end of the day, maybe that was all Dean could really ask for, and certainly more than he felt he deserved. But as Castiel turned away and headed down the alley, his silhouette merging with shadows and then gone, Dean decided to take that feeling in both fists and keep it in his back pocket with his old ghosts, to save it for later.

~end


End file.
